Trump posts old images amid renewed US strikes on Iran
- Published on July 9, 2026 at 23:17
- 4 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
US President Donald Trump shared an image of a massive fire and plumes of smoke on July 8, 2026, claiming it showed his country's "retribution" for Iranian attacks on ships traversing the vital Strait of Hormuz. But the picture is an altered version of a photo taken more than a year earlier, an AFP investigation found.
"This is in retribution for yesterday's bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!" Trump wrote in the Truth Social post sharing a screenshot of an X post from an account called "@Osint613," which claimed it showed "Chabahar, Iran."
The official White House X account reshared the president's post, and the Pentagon republished it to Facebook. The right-wing TV network Newsmax also amplified the visual.
The post came as new fighting erupted between the United States and Iran ahead of the burial of longtime supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed by US-Israeli strikes February 28, events that plunged the Middle East into war.
Trump declared the delicate ceasefire "over" on July 8 as the United States blasted Iran with extensive strikes, after Tehran hit several commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow gateway for one-fifth of the world's oil. The Islamic republic said it had also resumed its attacks targeting US assets in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar.
But the image Trump claimed on Truth Social showed "retribution" is unrelated to the renewed hostilities.
"BIG CORRECTION: I just double checked and this image is not from tonight," the "@Osint613" X account, which first shared it, wrote in a follow-up post (archived here). Later, the account posted again saying the image had "circulated in Iranian accounts" (archived here).
Reverse image searches surfaced a near-identical photo from Getty Images dated to June 2025 (archived here).
The caption on the photo -- and other shots showing the same inferno -- says it shows fire and smoke rising "into the sky after an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot on June 15, 2025 in Tehran, Iran" (archived here).
The capital is hundreds of miles away from the city of Chabahar, mentioned in the "@Osint613" post.
A video also in the Getty Images archive shows the same fire burning (archived here).
The version Trump posted was also altered, with several details enhanced or otherwise changed.
The cylindrical fuel storage tanks that appear in the Getty Images original -- and also show up damaged in Google Earth satellite imagery of the area -- do not exist in the version Trump shared, which instead depicts a structure of a different shape (archived here).
AFP photos from the time also show the storage tanks, but not the building depicted in the image shared by Trump.
OpenAI's image verification tool found the version Trump shared contained a SynthID -- the invisible watermark integrated from Google that the company uses to embed signals in AI-generated media created with its platforms (archived here and here).
The Hive Moderation tool similarly concluded the image was "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content," attributing it to ChatGPT Images 2.0.
The synthetic image detector available via the InVID-WeVerify toolkit also found evidence the image was synthetic.
Later on July 8, 2026, Trump posted a cropped, unedited version of the 2025 image, again without context.
Old AFP photo
A second image Trump posted on July 8, 2026 -- of an explosion over a cityscape -- was also out of context.
The photo was in fact captured by an AFP photographer on March 7. It shows the site of Israeli airstrikes at Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about Iran here.
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